After years breathing AMD's dust, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 'Clovertown' processor for servers in November. But AMD's 'Barcelona' quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said.

yeah so funny. but there was a time when we didn't have all this competition from AMD and we'd be stuck with much slower processors. I remember when AMD was just an also-ran. Now they are calling the shots and really pushing Intel.

that is why MONOPOLY SUCKS. It makes them complacent and at the end, end users are short changed.

Can't imagine we have been living in Intel's slouch for years, insisting in continuing with their age-old proven-inferior FSB/netburst technology. Without competition from AMD, we'll still be in 32bit world, ever hotter CPU and useless speed.